Otago German Studies (E-Journal)

--, --

4.5 Heinrich Kühleborn: \u27Rotkäppchen und die Wölfe\u27

English

"Une saison en enfer": Die erste Saison der Freien Bühne und Fontanes Kritiken

"Die wahre hohe Schule der Zweideutigkeit": Frivolität in Fontanes Romanen

5 CONCLUSIONS 
Firstly, it is clear then that the adoption of, and dramatic adaptation 
of, Goethe's Marchen by Steiner, for his drama, Die Pforte der 
Einweihung has its origin in the convictions of Steiner that, 
1: Goethe's view of spirituality is closely related to the 
anthroposophical world view, and both are allied to the Rosicrucian 
movement of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 
2: That spiritual perception, like sensory perceiving, is inhe-
rently viable because it derives from the efficacy of the postulated 
ether-body, and this enables viable spiritual enlightenment. 
Secondly, it is clear that the rhetoric of Die Pforte is intended to 
didactically communicate, in an artistic medium, the following eso-
teric convictions which are central to Steiner's anthroposophy: 
A: That reincarnation and karma are real dynamics affecting 
human life, and offer a rational and accurate explanation for the 
differing destinies and abilities in human life. 
B: That the philosophically assumed limits to knowledge are not 
valid, because human cognitional power can be extended beyond 
their present boundaries through meditation, which gives access to 
higher consciousness states. 
C: That human life unfolds on Earth as a microcosmic reflection 
of a sevenfold macrocosmic evolutionary template. 
D: That the attainment of spiritual consciousness is linked to the 
ethical refinement of the human being, especially the conscience, 
and this is linked to a subtle influence from within the ethers, of 
Christ Jesus. 
E: That the Earth is a living being, possessing subtle spiritual 
levels of Being to which humanity is subtly linked, and that the 
continuance of unethical activity and attitudes in humanity is harm-
ful to this realm. 
295 
F: That in the quest for spiritual development, the triune human 
soul must resist the influences of a twofold source of unethical ten-
dencies. The soul must seek to allow a transformation of its triune 
qualities into a triune spiritual entity. 
G: That artistic media offer a valuable method for the instruction 
of people into spiritual themes, and also that artistic experience is a 
valuable assistance in attaining to spirituality. 
The overall perspective of Steiner's on the need for a spiritual 
holistic attitude, and the value of his own life's work in providing 
this, is conveyed, in an artistic manner, in a poem written in 1920, 
The world without the spirit is 
For the human being like a book 
Written in a language 
Which he cannot read, 
Yet of which he knows its content 
determines life itself. 
Die Welt ist ohne den Geist 
Fi.ir den Menschen wie ein 
Buch, 
AbgefaBt in einer Sprache, 
Die er nicht lesen kann, 
Doch von dem er weiB 
DaB sein Inhalt lebenbestim-
mend ist. 
And spiritual science wants to strive Und Geisteswissenschaft will 
Towards the art of reading; Erstreben die Kunst des Lesens; 
It believes itself to be necessary Sie halt sich fiir notwendig, 
Because it must believe . Weil sie glauben muB, 
That it is demanded DaB sie von dem Leben 
By that life itself Selbst gefordert wird, 
Into which humanity has entered In das die Menschheit 
Through developmental forces Durch die Entwickelungskrafte 
of contemporary times. Der Gegenwart eingetreten ist. 
296 


5 CONCLUSIONS

4. Bowing to a Higher Authority

Vogel, Alois

Total Blackout (Part 2)

Part 2 Mehigan, Tim

I. The New Context of German Studies 
Overview 
Tim Mehigan (Otago) 
The authors of the three essays in this section describe a crisis afflicting 
the practice of German Studies in today's universities. While each author 
is mainly concerned to discuss their own national context - Patricia Her-
minghouse focuses on the situation in the United States, Tim Mehigan 
discusses the Australian situation, while Thomas Pekar offers a compa-
rative discussion of German and Japanese universities - the emergence of 
a general crisis affecting German Studies throughout the world must now 
be taken as given. 
The authors di vine various reasons for this global crisis of German 
Studies. For Herminghouse, who begins by considering the impact of 
legislation affecting the teaching of languages after the Second World 
War at the beginning of the "post-Sputnik era," German Studies in the 
United States has been forced to meet the challenge of one set of exigen-
cies after another over a long period. If the need to advance the speaking 
ability of Americans by making use of new technology arose in response 
to political imperatives in the Cold War environment of the sixties, it was 
economic imperatives that were dominant from the 1970s on. These im-
peratives required universities to equip graduates with concrete skills that 
would serve them in the market place. Indeed, the rise of a multi-
disciplinary model of "German Studies" in the United States at this time 
was a direct response to the need to contribute an economically com-
petitive advantage to "the national interest." Herminghouse makes clear 
that traditional departments of German had to find adequate responses to 
this so-called national interest, or go under. In the 1980s and 1990s, a 
more sophisticated understanding of the factors underpinning market 
competitiveness has emerged. This more culturally informed idea of what 
makes for competitiveness in the market place is the new "ghost in the 
machine" that underlies the situation in all the countries under discussion. 
1 
As the three contributors in this section point out, the arrival of 
"cultural studies" in the university has fundamentally changed the situa-
tion of language teaching and learning. Yet whether cultural studies can 
lay claim to a real content, and whether it is anything more than a metho-
dology, a new way of approaching the study of literature and texts, 
remains unclear. At any rate, a reflection on the significance of its in-
cursion into the foreign language curriculum appears paramount. As the 
three authors in this section indicate, the rise of the Anglophone notion of 
cultural studies from the 1950s can be variously explained. One expla-
nation for the success of a more class-sensitive notion of cultural aware-
ness - the lynchpin of the English model of cultural studies - appears to lie 
with recent answers to the question of what makes for successful selling 
in the international market place. As Pekar notes about Japan, a country 
that rebuilt itself in the postwar era on the back of international trade, 
both a general sensitivity to the notion of culture as such and a specific 
understanding of the foreign culture of the trading partner are considered 
important. In the globally focused world of the 1990s and 2000s, then, 
notions of culture both high and low, elite and popular have not only 
become firmly established, they are now also entrenched. As a result, the 
teaching and learning of foreign languages in our universities cannot but 
take account of old and new ideas of culture and the need to make cur-
ricula and programmes respond to them. Therefore, however this interest 
in the importance of culture has come about, and notwithstanding the cost 
to the sovereignty of older ideas that used to govern foreign language 
offerings in the university setting, practitioners of German Studies across 
the world, including those who teach literature and culture in Germany, 
have had to address the challenge of cultural studies as a phenomenon. 
This, then, is the underlying situation of "interdisciplinarity" on which the 
three authors in this section reflect from their varying standpoints. 
For Mehigan, this new situation would appear to make the case for a 
refocused German Studies that highlights the German contribution to the 
compendium of dominant cultural ideas in the world today, as well as a 
general upskilling of teachers to meet the demands of a revitalised, cul-
turally more rigorous, language curriculum. Such a change suggests that 
2 
German departments should pursue a more expansive notion of their 
discipline in order to regain territory ceded to other departments in the 
wake of the emergence of cultural studies. Concomitantly, the need to 
counteract the perception that language departments lack intellectuality 
with respect to other areas of the university has, he believes, become 
urgent. This perception has arisen where language departments expend 
most of their energy on imparting language instruction. The sense of 
diminished intellectuality is the political factor in many universities 
underlying the erosion of disciplinary identity in German Studies. 
Pekar goes further by offering intellectual models that would serve the 
goal of the refocusing and upskilling that Mehigan argues for. He refers to 
the linguistically based cultural theories of Eis Oksaar and the semiotics 
of Roland Barthes in suggesting ways in which the communicative 
situation in foreign language learning could be enhanced and the cultural 
dimensions of communication better understood. Herminghouse, for her 
part, points out the dangers of overcompensation, as language scholars, 
following new notions of interdisciplinarity, attempt to return to long 
abandoned cognate areas of history, politics, media studies, and literature. 
Dilettantism is no solution where real expertise is called for. Accordingly, 
she urges that such a return not take place willy-nilly, but only on the 
basis of what is academically justifiable. 
Pekar' s discussion of an enriched notion of communication owes 
much to the methodological discussion about the literary tradition of 
"Germanistik" currently taking place in Germany. While it is common to 
separate the study of German culture and language outside Germany-
" Auslandsgermanistik" (or what Pekar and others capitalise as Qerman 
S.tudies) - from this same study within Germany, which is thought to 
pursue different ends, such a distinction is not easily maintained. In part, 
this may be read into the difficulties attending the canonising of the texts 
and text types held to evince cultural content as the move in Germany 
toward a new culturally based German studies is negotiated. These dif-
ficulties have been reproduced, perhaps on a smaller scale, in discussions 
outside Germany about the merits of "nationally" focused German Stu-
dies. A line of separation between "German Studies" and "Germanistik" 
3 
would also appear to be questionable in view of the entry into Germany of 
the Anglophone version of cultural studies with its attendant presup-
positions. How far this model of cultural studies can be applied to the 
German situation is one of the many issues that await resolution in the 
debate in Germany. Moreover, as Pekar argues, it is not yet clear if this 
debate represents anything f!lOre than a rehearsal of the older civilisation-
culture debate of the early part of the twentieth century. In this older 
debate, the socially progressive dimensions of culture as an idea were 
considered separate from the ideological commitments of the Western 
model of civilisation. Clearly the debate about cultural studies, along with 
many others like it, is far from settled. 
4 


I. The New Context of German Studies Overview

Boss, Bettina

III. Language Acqusition and the German Language 
Classroom 
Overview 
Bettina Boss (New South Wales) 
Teaching foreign language courses has long been considered "the 
cinderella of staff duty" in Australian universities (Leal 1991:137 108),* a 
chore far removed from the esoteric realm of scholarship. But the emer-
gence of second language acquisition research as an academic discipline 
has opened up a rich field of enquiry into the processes involved in 
language learning, a field which has seen an increasing number of con-
tributions, particularly in the form of empirical studies, from researchers 
who are committed language teachers (Diehl 2002). Research of this kind 
is crucial for testing theories, but is also has the potential to contribute to 
improvements in foreign language pedagogy. The papers in this section 
discuss empirical studies based on real-life classroom settings, involving 
learners as diverse as school children in Geneva and Australian tertiary 
students. Since the results of these studies have important implications for 
the way German is taught, not only but also in Australian universities, it 
seems appropriate to introduce this section with a brief glimpse at the 
history of German language teaching in Australian tertiary institutions. 
The University of Sydney was the first Australian university to offer 
courses in German (and French) from 1853, followed by Melbourne Uni-
versity in 1884; soon afterwards both universities established "Chairs in 
Literature, whose incumbents were expected to teach English, French and 
German Languages and Literature" (Barko 1996a:6). It was not until after 
the Second World War that chairs in German Language and Literature 
were established at the two universities. The post-war period saw a 
dramatic expansion of the tertiary sector and the number of German 
108 According to Diehl (2002), this attitude is also prevalent in tertiary foreign language 
departments in European countries. 
* Full bibliographical references for this section appear on pages 167-170. 
125 
departments grew to twelve (Schulz 1976:106). By that time, modern 
language departments in Australian universities generally followed the 
"Language-and-Literature model, where the balance of the two compo-
nents tends to tip towards the latter, language being seen as the utilitarian 
servant of literature-the-mistress" (Barko 1996a:7; cf. Tisdell 1997:95). 
The late sixties and seventies brought dramatic changes to the tertiary 
foreign language sector, notably the removal of compulsory foreign 
language study as a prerequisite for university entry and the resulting drop 
in enrolments for both secondary and tertiary foreign language courses. 
At the same time the range of languages offered in both sectors grew to 
include other European languages like Modern Greek, as well as Asian 
languages such as Japanese. Since university students could no longer be 
expected to have studied a foreign language at school, tertiary German 
and other language departments introduced introductory courses for be-
ginners, with the result that language courses generally, particularly those 
at elementary level, began to dominate the departments' offerings, at least 
in terms of contact hours and student enrolments ( cf. Tisdell 1997: 96). 
That, and the emergence of "background studies" as well as or instead of 
literature courses contributed to the demise of the traditional language and 
literature model (Barko 1996b:7; Schulz 1976:109 f.). Although the 
practice of language teaching underwent great changes at that time, such 
as the introduction of language laboratories and later the influence of the 
communicative approach, it was not regarded as a "high-level intellectual 
activity" (Quinn cited in Barko 1996b:7) and "entrusted to junior, unten-
ured and casual staff (generally of the female gender)" (Barko 1996a:7). It 
is interesting to note that scholars like Michael Clyne, Manfred Piene-
mann and Howard Nicholas, who spent some of their professional lives 
attached to tertiary German departments, went on to make their most 
significant contributions not in German Studies, but in applied linguistics 
and language acquisition research (cf. McNamara 2001). 
By the mid-nineties, German was taught to approximately 2500 stu-
dents at 15 tertiary institutions (Djite 1994: 120). The students surveyed 
by Ammon in 1987 nominated a range of reasons for studying German, 
but their strongest motive was "communication with German-speaking 
126 
persons abroad" (Fernandez et al 1994:77, cf. Ammon 1991:35,45). 
However, the authors of the Leal Report found that academic staff teach-
ing German regarded research in literature most highly, whereas language 
learning and teaching was the research area most valued by Japanese staff 
(Leal et al 1991: 135), a situation also observed by Harting in his 
comparative study of German and Japanese departments at UNSW 
(Harting 2003). 
A decade later, German departments are increasingly being amal-
gamated with other foreign language and in some cases linguistics 
departments to form larger academic units. While this development may 
lead to the loss of a distinctive identity for academics teaching German 
Studies, including the loss of German-speaking administrative staff, it 
offers new opportunities for collaboration between teachers and resear-
chers from previously separate foreign language departments. Language 
acquisition research is one area which can benefit from collaborative 
projects, and given the pressures on researchers to apply for large national 
grants, there may be pragmatic as well as scholarly reasons for studies 
involving several languages. 
In summing up 150 years of tertiary German teaching in Australia, 
Barko's image of the spiral symbolising the "simultaneous phenomena of 
repetition and advancement" (Barko 1996a:7) seems most appropriate. 
One regrettable sign of repetition is the current renewal of the debate 
"over the intellectual usefulness of language learning as part of an aca-
demic education," a debate in which those who argue that language learn-
ing is "just a skill" (Liddicoat et al 1997:20) deny the many cognitive and 
cultural dimensions involved in the acquisition of another language. 
On the positive side, the geographical distance between Australia and 
the German-speaking countries is no longer the obstacle deplored by 
Schulz in the seventies (1976:112f.): thanks to the internet, Australians 
now have access to a wide range of up-to-date authentic German-lan-
guage materials, travel to Europe is cheaper and faster than ever, and 
more and more students are able to include a semester or two of overseas 
university study in their degree programmes. Obviously this phenomenon, 
127 
especially the availability of the internet and other new media, has a 
profound influence on foreign language pedagogy, not only in the sense 
that teachers need to learn to use the new technology to enhance their 
teaching; it is equally important for them to understand and harness the 
autonomy their students gain from having easier and more plentiful 
access to the target language. 
The autonomy of language learners and the fact that they follow their 
own paths towards mastery of the target language, irrespective of how 
they are taught, is the central theme linking the papers in this section. Put 
simply, that is the main finding of the pioneering DiGS (Deutsch in 
Genfer Schulen) project, discussed here by Boss and Diehl. On the basis 
of the largest corpus of data for German as a foreign language, Diehl and 
her colleagues investigated the way Francophone school children 
acquired German word order, verb morphology and case assignment, and 
the learning strategies they used in the process. (Interestingly, the strategy 
teachers tend to suspect most often, namely transfer from the learners' 
first language, seemed to occur only in the area of word order.) The 
project is remarkable not only in its scope, but also because it successfully 
explored an important research area as well as serving a practical purpose; 
it was designed to contribute to a review of the German curriculum in 
Geneva'schools and involved a unique cooperation between researchers, 
teachers and public officials. Because of this dual objective, the main 
publication of the project team (Diehl et al. 2000) is as relevant for 
teachers as it is for researchers ( cf. also Boss and Jansen 2003a, 2003b ). 
Jansen's paper provides the background to the DiGS project by 
surveying the main trends in international research studies on stages of 
acquisition in German as a second or foreign language. It traces the 
impetus for classroom-based research from the earlier studies into the 
natural acquisition of the language by guest workers in Germany, notably 
the influential ZISA (Zweitspracherwerb italienischer und spanischer 
Arbeiter) project (Clahsen Meisel, Pienemann 1983), which had shown 
that German word order is acquired in a universal sequence of incremen-
tal steps. The paper contains a detailed description of the acquisitional 
stages in German word order and discusses the possible reasons why the 
128 
sequence found by the DiGS team differs from that in earlier studies 
involving oral data. (On the question whether inversion precedes or 
follows verb-final position in subordinate clauses see also Boss 2004 and 
Lund 2004.) 
While the two previous papers report on empirical language acqui-
sition studies, Schneider uses the framework of motivational research for 
her study on contextual factors affecting German language courses in the 
Australian tertiary sector. Based on data from a survey of students of Ger-
man at Monash University in 2002, she discusses the students' responses 
on their language background, their reasons for studying German and 
expectations of the course, comparing these responses with the teaching 
syllabus. Like Ammon (1991), Schneider finds the students are mainly 
motivated to learn the language for the purpose of communication, an 
aspiration which contrasts starkly with the course programme with its 
strong emphasis on teaching and testing grammatical knowledge, a 
situation which is perhaps not untypical of Australian tertiary German 
courses generally. But Schneider also states that despite their preference 
for learning to speak, her informants mentioned grammar practice as the 
language activity they undertook most frequently outside the classroom; 
as well as responding to the emphasis on grammar in the course, the 
students, according to the author, felt grammar exercises were something 
they could control. Maybe a similar tendency causes teachers to turn to 
grammar practice when their students cannot produce the structures they 
were taught, as Boss and Diehl state. 
What can teachers and course designers for German as a foreign 
language learn from the research findings discussed in the three papers? 
The principal common message that emerges is the need for a more 
learner-centred approach, which Schneider would like to see formalised 
through individual language learning portfolios, tracking the learners' 
strength and weaknesses and encouraging them to take control of the 
learning process. The more radical recommendations made by Jansen, 
Boss and Diehl involve a rethinking of the way grammar is taught, with a 
syllabus based on stages of acquisition rather than the sequence in which 
grammatical structures are normally presented in textbooks. This should 
129 
not involve using simplified, unauthentic language forms, since "unlearn-
able structures" (Jansen) like inversion can be introduced before students 
are expected to master them; it does however, call for a more complex 
approach to error correction, one that differentiates between errors within 
and those beyond the individual learners' stage of acquisition. 
Each of these recommendations needs to be refined and tested in 
realistic settings, and despite budget cuts and increasing class sizes, 
tertiary foreign language departments still offer the best environment for 
classroom-based research, often carried out by researchers who are also 
language teachers (cf. Diehl 2002). It is to be hoped that the papers in this 
section will contribute to a growing body of research projects of this type 
in the future. 
130 


III. Language Acquisition and the German Language Classroom Overview

Bettina Boss, Erika Diehl and

Teaching German Grammar: Strictly for the Birds?

Not a member yet